Tips & How-Tos¶

Adding Category Views to the rTorrent UI¶

Version 0.5.1 enables you to easily add category views, that also play nice with ruTorrent labels in custom_1. Since this relies on key bindings, it only works using rTorrent-PS.

First, you need to define your category names and watches, like in this example:

cd ~/rtorrent
~/.local/pyroscope/src/scripts/add-categories.sh books hdtv movies

It is recommended to stick to alphanumeric category names, and use _ for word separation.

The watches put loaded items into the given category, and they expect metafiles in ~/rtorrent/watch/‹category-name›.

To remove a category, just edit it out of the rtorrent.d/categories.rc file, and then call the add-categories.sh script without any arguments to clean things up.

On an existing installation, to auto-create categories for all the ruTorrent labels you already have (and that also fit the alphanumeric constraint), call this:

cd ~/rtorrent
~/.local/pyroscope/src/scripts/add-categories.sh \
    $(rtcontrol custom_1=\! -qo custom_1 | egrep '^[_a-zA-Z0-9]+$' | sort -u)

Note

After these configuration changes, don’t forget to restart rTorrent.

In the rTorrent-PS user interface, you can now work with the following keys:

Rotate through category views using < and >.

The | key updates the current category view, i.e. filters for new or removed items.

The sort order of these views is the same as main, and if you switch to any other view and back to categories, you always start at the first category view (from the sorted list of category names).

Dumping Items as a JSON Array¶

If you want to access rTorrent item data in machine readable form via rtcontrol, you can use its --json option and feed the output into another script parsing the JSON data for further processing.

Here’s an example:

$ rtcontrol --json -qo name,is_ghost,directory,fno foo
[
  {
    "directory": "/var/torrent/load/foo",
    "fno": 1,
    "is_ghost": false,
    "name": "foo"
  }
]

Note

When using --json, the list of fields given with -o must consist only of plain field names, i.e. format specifiers aren’t supported. If you need derived values, the process parsing the output needs to calculate them.

Working With Several rTorrent Instances¶

Switching to the ‘rtorrent.rc’ of an Instance¶

Both rtcontrol and rtxmlrpc read the existing rTorrent configuration to extract some settings, so that you don’t need to maintain them twice – most importantly the details of the XMLRPC connection. That is why config.ini has the rtorrent_rc setting, and changing that is the key to select a different instance you have running.

Just pass the option -D rtorrent_rc=PATH_TO/rtorrent.rc to either rtcontrol or rtxmlrpc, to read the configuration of another instance than the default one. For convenient use on the command line, you can add shell aliases to you profile.

Customizing the Default Configuration per Instance¶

Since version 0.5.1, the extensions to the rTorrent configuration are loaded via the commands in ~/.pyroscope/rtorrent-pyro.rc.default, importing snippets found in the ~/.pyroscope/rtorrent.d/ directory. The commands.rc.default file located there contains commands that use rtcontrol behind the scenes.

As shown in the previous section, these commands must use -D to load the right configuration. Instead of switching to importing the *.rc variants wholesale, with all the work that comes with that after updates, you can simply ignore just the commands.rc.default file, and replace it with an adapted copy in your main configuration file.

So, in summary, to customize a ~/rtorrent1 instance:

echo >>~/.pyroscope/rtorrent.d/.rcignore "commands.rc.default"
sed -r -e 's:--detach:--detach,-D,"rtorrent_rc=~/rtorrent1/rtorrent.rc":' \
    ~/.pyroscope/rtorrent.d/commands.rc.default \
    >>~/rtorrent1/rtorrent.rc

Now commands like s= are defined in ~/rtorrent1/rtorrent.rc, and commands.rc.default is not imported, so no duplicate definition errors occur.

Moving All Data for Selected Items to a New Location¶

This shows how to move the data of all items for a specific tracker (identified by the alias TRK) from ~/rtorrent/data/ to ~/rtorrent/data/tracker/. Note that you can do that in ruTorrent too, but with too many items, or items too big, the results vary (data is not or only partially moved).

This sequence of commands will stop and relocate the loaded items, move their data, and finally start everything again.

mkdir -p ~/rtorrent/data/tracker
rtcontrol --to-view tagged alias=TRK realpath=$HOME/rtorrent/data
rtcontrol --from-view tagged // --stop
rtcontrol --from-view tagged // --exec "directory.set=$HOME/rtorrent/data/tracker" --yes
rtcontrol --from-view tagged // --spawn "mv {{item.path}} $HOME/rtorrent/data/tracker"
rtcontrol --from-view tagged // --start

By changing the first rtcontrol command that populates the tagged view, you can change this to move data for any criteria you can think of — within the limits of rtcontrol Filter Conditions. Also, if you run rTorrent-PS, you can manually remove items from the tagged view by using the . key, before applying the rest of the commands.

Also see the Advanced ‘rtcontrol’ section that explains the --spawn and --exec options in more depth.

Note

The tagged view is used here solely for the purpose of allowing manual manipulation of the search result after step 1, when using rTorrent-PS. It is not related to the tagged field in any way.

They’re just different ways to tag items, one of them visually in the rTorrent-PS UI.

Tag Episodes in rT-PS, Then Delete Their Whole Season¶

The command below allows you to delete all items that belong to the same season of a TV series, where single episodes were tagged as a stand-ins for that season. The tagging can be done interactively in rTorrent-PS, using the . key.

rtcontrol --from tagged -s* -qoname "/\\.S[0-9][0-9]E[0-9][0-9]\\./" \
    | sed -re 's/(.+\.[sS]..[eE])..\..+/\1/' | uniq | \
    | xargs -I# -d$'\n' rtcontrol '/^#/' --cull --yes -A dupes- loaded=+2w

The culling command call also protects any item younger than 2 weeks.

Using Tags or Flag Files to Control Item Processing¶

If you want to perform some actions on download items exactly once, you can use tags or flag files to mark them as handled. The basic pattern works like this:

#! /usr/bin/env bash
guard="handled"
…

rtcontrol --from-view complete -qohash tagged=\!$guard | \
while read hash; do
    …

    # Mark item as handled
    rtcontrol -q --from-view $hash // --tag "$guard" --flush --yes --cron
done

The --from-view $hash // is an efficient way to select a specific item by hash, in case you wondered. hash=‹infohash› in contrast loads all items, then filters out just one.

A variant of this is to use a flag file in the download’s directory – such a file can be created and checked by simply poking the file system, which can have advantages in some situations. To check for the existance of that file, add a custom field to your config.py as follows:

def is_synced(obj):
    "Check for .synced file."
    pathname = obj.path
    if pathname and os.path.isdir(pathname):
        return os.path.exists(os.path.join(pathname, '.synced'))
    else:
        return False if pathname else None

yield engine.DynamicField(engine.untyped, "is_synced", "does download have a .synced flag file?",
    matcher=matching.BoolFilter, accessor=is_synced,
    formatter=lambda val: "SYNC" if val else "????" if val is None else "!SYN")

The condition is_synced=no is then used instead of the tagged one in the bash snippet above, and setting the flag is a simple touch. Add a rsync call to the while loop in the example and you have a cron job that can be used to transfer completed items to another host exactly once. Note that this only works for multi-file items, since a data directory is assumed – supporting single-file items is left as an exercise for the reader. See Defining Custom Fields for more details regarding custom fields.